Someone recently used the word, “audition” to describe their long drawn-out process of picking and choosing items to use. That is a fitting word for the task of looking at lots of possibilities until you finally find that right one.

I’ve almost eliminated the audition process.

Only once in a while do I need to spend even five minutes “auditioning.” Now I just play and create.

And on top of that I have very little cleanup time because of my setup and process.

Really, it is an absolute dream.

I want to share it with you, and today I’m specifically sharing how I’ve organized my embellishments.

Here are five things you can do to make it easier to choose and then put away embellishments:

Sort your items by the categories you regularly search for.
Some of the categories of items I regularly search for are red items; flourish items for a ballet album; bright and sunny items for outdoors Arizona pages; neutral items; brand new stuff; love-related items for relationship stories; house-related items; enamel dots; etc).

Store your items by these categories you’ve identified.
If you’re always looking for mint-colored items and it takes you more than a minute to find and gather them, it makes sense to have a store of mint items waiting for you. But that doesn’t mean you must also have containers for every other color — it would be unhelpful to have a store of items in a category you don’t tend to look for. You will rarely or never end up using those.

Eliminate the overwhelm of too much stuff by categorizing.
Grab only one or two of these stored categories when you’re scrapbooking and bring them to your table. This will allow you to keep a decent sized stash overall, but give you the benefit of having fewer items to choose from. Too many choices leads to cognitive dissonance and overwhelm, which stop creativity.

If an item sits unused too long, re-categorize it and store it in one of your other spots.
By dividing your embellishments into categories, you can choose to re-categorize any items that aren’t getting used. I find that just by re-categorizing something and storing it in a different way, I breathe new life into that item.

This has made the process so fast for me.

You have to see it to believe it.

And you can, because we just shot a video that shows me using a lot of different embellishments on one page without the “audition” time of trying to pick and choose what will work best. I share even more tips and solutions to share on the video, too.

Plus, my table was clean when I was done. I just had a few containers to slip back into place and my table was clean and ready for the next page within a single minute.

But you need a Paperclipping Membership to watch the video.

It’s in the Member’s Area now. CLICK HERE to learn about a membership.

For years I’ve been recommending scrapbookers organize stuff based on the way they hunt for things. Well, I’ve been refining my own system and this year I’ve hit on one that has revolutionized it all for me in a way that no other organization re-do ever has.

Today I’m excited to share with you my 3-part system for storing patterned paper. I’ve never heard of anyone else who organizes like this so don’t give up on this post if the first two parts of the system seem crazy. The third part will make you feel better and with all three parts together you have every possible way I can think of to organize your paper.

Ready to see how it works?

Part 1 – Store 12×12’s by Mood and Tone
There’s a pretty limited number of emotions and moods. Our patterned papers reflect a good handful of them, both in the colors and in the patterns themselves.

Sort them by mood and put your favorite papers of each mood in the front. When you pull out the photo(s) you want to scrap, ask yourself what the mood is and then go to the patterned papers for that mood.

Paper choice used to be the slowest part of my process after journaling, but now I find my paper within seconds. I keep expecting this to stop working and so far it continues to blow my mind! If you’re skeptical, read what one of the Paperclipping Members said after she watched the related video tutorial I posted to the membership:

Oh my, I think I’m sold. I just reorganized all my papers using this method (I was using by manufacturer before and it was cumbersome to flip through everything every time, but color alone didn’t work for me so I stuck to brand). I feel liberated already. It took me less than an hour (I don’t have too much, maybe 80 full sheets or so) but I think the ease with which it came together indicates something. I started just putting things into piles and at first I had way too many piles, but I started to come up with preliminary categories and tweaking as I went. I found that as I continued I would come upon one or two “ah ha!” pieces that just totally screamed whatever I was trying to say, and then it was easier to put the harder to categorize papers with those obvious ones. I ended up with seven of my own categories that I feel great about.

The real test came when I was done however. I’ve been staring at these two photos on my desk for a couple of weeks now–I wanted to use them with orange and cut part of this truly pretty orange paper with a graphic white pattern. But something was totally off and I was making no progress. I looked at them again tonight after the reorg, and decided they were actually “whimsical/fun” photos and pulled out a large white/orange dot pattern from that folder. There is no comparison, it works now–even though the oranges are basically the same! It just feels better.

Thanks so much, Noell!

PS of course, when my boyfriend asked what I was doing, and I said that was organizing my paper by how it makes me feel, he thought I was crazy. But when he saw how quickly I was done, I think even he was impressed. He is used to seeing me obsess over half-finished organizational schemes for much longer than this took!

Part 2 – Store Scraps Together
All scraps smaller than eight or so inches wide go together in one tray, tin, or other container.

Yes, all of them, together.

Does that idea make you twitch? Well guess what? You will find the most enchanting paper combinations this way — ones you could never have planned, dreamed of, nor found in a store and created by even your favorite designers.

Whenever I go to weed out the scraps I no longer love, serendipity happens. Here are two layouts that have resulted from this…

And just a note — I store most of my screen-printed transparencies along with my paper. They might be made of a different material but most of them function like patterned paper, so I don’t see any reason they should be separated.

Part 3 – Store 6×6 Paper Pads Together
Do this in a way that you can flip through them and easily see the fronts. Mine are in a wooden box.

Obviously, I’m the last to do this, not the first. But it’s a great part of this system because it allows you to hunt for your papers in some of those other ways we all sometimes do:

by color

by manufacturer

This way you won’t be lost if you’re worried about not having your large sheets and your scraps organized by color or manufacturer. Because companies put a sampling of the patterns on the front of the paper pads, you can quickly flip through the pads to see what your options are. Then you can pull from there.

All 3 Parts Working Together
With this 3-part system in place you can now look for papers in all of the possible ways I can think of, not just one:

by mood

by serendipitous scrap accidents

by color

by manufacturer

Paperclipping Members who want to launch a study of topics related to this — organization, mixing and matching patterned papers, and scrapbooking with scraps or by mood through via design principles — can watch these video tutorials: